What went wrong for Republicans? Q&A with Shawn Lindsay

Shawn Lindsay was one of two Republican state representatives in the Hillsboro area who lost their reelection bids this month to Democrats. Ben Unger defeated Katie Eyre in a close race in House District 29, and Joe Gallegos topped Lindsay in a three-way race that saw Libertarian Kyle Markley pick up 6 percent of the vote, more than the 4 percentage points that separated Gallegos and Lindsay in House District 30.

Lindsay discussed what went wrong for him and for the Republican Party in an interview with Argus Opinion Editor George Rede. Questions and answers have been edited for brevity. Q. Why do you think you lost? Why did Gallegos win?

A. For me to win in a district with nearly 7 percent more registered Democrats than Republicans, I had to win 95 percent of the Republican vote and win 15 percent of the Democrats and at least 50 percent of the non-affiliated voters. Had I done all that, I would have won by just over 250 votes. It's a tight needle to thread.

I had done it before during the mid-term election (in 2010). But it's an even tougher battle during a presidential election because people tend to vote a straight party ticket. Q. How much of a factor was Markley?

A. I do think the Libertarian candidate had some effect. We called every Libertarian household in the district -- 98 households, even Markley himself -- and also had the former chair of the Libertarian Party call every single household on my behalf. We also did direct mailers. We calculated he'd draw maybe 200 votes and make us work even harder to thread the needle.

Q. In fact, he drew 1,257 votes, compared to 11,006 for Gallegos and 10,040 for you.

A. The only explanation I can think of is maybe I haven't curried enough favor with Libertarians. Maybe my bipartisanship drove them away. Either way, I guess we need to do more work to identify them and court them.

Q. What's your take on the Washington County and statewide results for Republicans? Except for John Davis in House District 26, no Republican with a significant portion of his district in Washington County managed to win a legislative seat, and Democrats swept the statewide offices.

A. I wasn't surprised at all. I think Democrats were surprised two years ago when we (Katie Eyre and myself) came in and took over those seats in Washington County. We had huge targets on us. Gallegos spent $600,000 on me and Unger spent (nearly) $700,000 against Katie. [Eyre spent $625,000 and Lindsay $520,000, according to campaign finance reports.]

We know how good midterm elections are for us though -- look at Bush in 2006 and Obama in 2010 -- and we're already organizing for 2014. I'm not going away.

Registration has dropped for Democrats and Republicans in the last four years, but not by as much for Republicans, so we're doubling down on our registration efforts. Non-affiliated voters are growing in numbers and strength, so we'll be working on those voters. I project we'll take those seats back. Q. What about the national results? What's the problem for Republicans?

A. I think it's pure operations. If you crunch the numbers, Romney lost by a total of 403,000 votes in swing states. If he had gotten those votes, he would have won. Obviously, we need to tweak the platform and message, but let's be honest. The Democrats have a machine to get out the vote. They have labor unions, a lot of special interests and they're all well oiled. (Nationally), the Republican (voting) surge is after 5 o'clock because that's when Republicans get off of work. We need to reverse engineer what the Democrats do. Take what they do and improve it.